The Evolution of our Story About Fox News’ Twitter Hackers (TIMELINE)

Last night, just after midnight, an update came across our Twitter feed from the Huffington Post about a possible hack of the Fox News Politics twitter account. The story that was linked to was brief and speculated that mysterious updates from the account was the work of a hacker.

At the time, the group claiming responsibility, The Script Kiddies, had not been hiding its identity or its intentions. On the Fox News Politics feed under their control, the group made themselves available for interviews with the media via AOL Instant Messaging.

Naturally I dusted off my AIM account and sent them a message. For the next 15 minutes I exchanged several messages with an anonymous person claiming to be a part of The Scripts Kiddies for an article that ran last night (and has since exploded).

A few things should be noted here: I don’t know, and have no way of verifying, the identity of the person I spoke with last night. I asked for a name and, unsurprisingly and understandingly, I did not get one.

But for what it’s worth, I firmly believe the individual I spoke with is part of The Script Kiddies. The AIM account that was used was mentioned directly by the person or persons who were posting to Twitter.

There will also be questions about why I did not ask about the shocking and false updates about President Obama that have now made news around the country

The simplest answer is that those updates came after I conducted the interview with The Script Kiddies, while I was writing the initial article. Once the first few updates mentioning President Obama were sent out, I returned to AIM to ask them about it.

2:04 am: “Ok, now I’m confused. Does Fox News have control of its Twitter account or not, because that last tweet that just came out over TweetDeck suggests otherwise

The Script Kiddies: i cannot confirm that at this time.

Stay tuned.

2:14 AM

Me: Alright, I’m going to assume that in fact Fox News does not have control of its Twitter feed because they would not be tweeting the false shooting of the president then linking back to you.

TSK: assume what you want.

That’s where the conversation ended for the evening. Because I know there will be questions, and because news reports out there woke up this morning missing a crucial half of the story, let me recap a bit:

[infolist]-The Script Kiddies initially hacked Fox News Politics’ twitter account around midnight on Sunday night. The first few tweets were harmless, merely indicating the group had taken over and linked back to the group’s first Twitter profile, which was quickly suspended by Twitter.

-At around 1:30am, the Script Kiddies sent out a message, now pretending to be Fox News, that the Twitter account had been restored. Earlier messages from The Script Kiddies were initially left on the account’s timeline.

-Shortly before 2:00am, the first tweets began to emerge detailing a fake incident involving President Obama being shot at in Iowa. These initial tweets included bit.ly links that directed to The Script Kiddies’ twitter profile.

-Around this time, perhaps 2:15am or so, the group removed all past mentions of itself from the twitter feed, including their initial posts as The Script Kiddies and any links that directed back to their page. To anyone who arrived at the Twitter page around this time it looked like the account was fine and not at all compromised.[/infolist]

And because we’ve already gotten questions from curious readers about it, I find it necessary to state for the record that neither myself nor anyone else from Think Magazine was aware of what was going to happen before it did. We do not know the identity of The Script Kiddies, nor would be divulge their identities if we did. I happened to be at the right place at the right time, that is all.